Sri Lankan chronicles, Chinese pilgrims and the nineteenth‐century hierarchy of texts in the construction of early Buddhist geography*

Abstract

This article examines how nineteenth‐century scholars reconstructed the geography of early Buddhism through a historically contingent hierarchy of texts that privileged Chinese monastic travelogues over Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles. Focusing on the relationship between the Pāli vaṃsa literature—especially the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa —and Chinese pilgrimage accounts attributed to Faxian and Xuanzang, it argues that European Orientalists, Sinologists and archaeologists assigned distinct epistemic functions to these sources. Chinese travelogues were treated as primary authorities for spatial reconstruction, while Sri Lankan chronicles were confined largely to chronology and historical validation. Through analysis of translators and archaeologists—especially Alexander Cunningham—it shows how chronicles became indispensable for dating Aśoka and the Buddha yet remained marginal in geographical reasoning. The hierarchy operated pragmatically: time belonged to chronicles, space to travellers and archaeology mediated between them. It further traces the afterlives of this structure, showing how European reconstructions reshaped Buddhist historical imagination and pilgrimage across Asia. By foregrounding textual hierarchy, the study argues that Buddhist geography was assembled through selective authority rather than simply discovered.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Religious History, 2026 · DOI ↗